This film portrays
the experiences of three women who resisted the Nazis during World War
II. The images you see on the screen contain photographs and footage filmed
during the war years as well as location footage and interviews shot in
the late 1990s.

Barbara Ledermann,
Faye Schulman and Shulamit (Shula) Lack were all born in the mid-1920s
to Jewish families and survived the Holocaust to recount their stories.
Living in different parts of Europe, they undertook different forms of
resistance. Faye went into battle with partisans in Poland (now Belarus).
In distributing illegal underground newspapers and assisting Jews in hiding,
Barbara fought against the German occupiers. Shula and her associates
in Zionist youth organizations in Hungary also resisted Nazi terror by
attempting to smuggle Jewish victims to safety.

By refusing to submit
to tyranny and murder, these three, like many others of courage and conscience,
resisted. They made the decision to fight back. Their story must be told
to counter the still too common myth that Hitler's victims submitted to
their deaths without a fight.

The three stories
portrayed in Daring to Resist demonstrate that the Holocaust, like the
war itself, did not come to all countries and regions in the same way
or at the same time. In discussing the Holocaust with students, teachers
should avoid oversimplifying complex events.

The role of women
in the Holocaust has been largely neglected. The stories of Barbara, Faye
and Shula reaffirm the fact that women made enormous contributions to
the fight against Nazism.

The Rise of NazismThe film's
main focus is on the war years, from Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland
in 1939 to its defeat in 1945. But of course the Holocaust did not suddenly
burst onto the scene with Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg.

Hitler's drive for
power began as early as 1919, first with an attempt to overthrow the German
democratic government by force, then by an effort to achieve power through
the ballot box and establish a dictatorship from above. The latter strategy
succeeded. Hitler was named Chancellor (similar to the post of Prime Minister)
on January 30, 1933.

He capitalized on
this position to establish, with a growing number of supporters, a dictatorship
based on his own personal rule, terror against opponents, and persecution
of those he considered "racial enemies," above all the Jews.

Anti-Semitism
as PolicyOver the
next several years, laws and decrees created a state based on the Nazis'
racist ideology, stripping German Jews of their jobs, their property,
and their civil rights. Many German Jews, like Barbara's family in the
film, emigrated to escape these racist policies, but few countries were
willing to offer refuge. Of those who did not emigrate, many victims were
reluctant to begin an entirely new life abroad, and others did not have
the means to pay for exit fees, taxes and bribes.

At the same time,
Hitler began to prepare for a war of European and even global conquest.
On November 9, 1938, legal measures against the Jews gave way to organized
violence during the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). Jewish homes,
businesses, community institutions and places of worship were attacked,
looted and destroyed. At least 32 people were killed, and the first mass
roundups of Jews took place, with more than 30,000 sent to concentration
camps.

Hitler's years of
preparation were crucial to the later implementation of the Holocaust.
German Jews suffered six years of persecution before the war brought the
Nazi racial program to much of the rest of Europe in the wake of conquering
German armies.

Origins of GenocideWhile prejudice,
hatred and persecution of Jews was common in overwhelmingly Christian
Europe, this seemed to give way to growing acceptance in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Assimilated Jews in Western and Central Europe
often lived and worked alongside non-Jews, attended the same public schools
and engaged in a shared civic life. Such was the case for Barbara's family
in Berlin up to 1933, and for Shula's family in Budapest. In Northeastern
Europe assimilation was less common.

Nazi Germany first
attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, and occupied the western part of
that country. In a secret agreement with Hitler, Stalin's Soviet Union
occupied eastern Poland, including Faye's village of Lenin. Lenin fell
to the Nazis when Hitler broke the pact and attacked the Soviet Union
in 1941.

Holland, where Barbara
lived after her German-Jewish family sought refuge there, was attacked
and occupied by the Germans in 1940.

Hungary, where Shula
lived, was an ally of Nazi Germany during the war, but the Hungarian government
resisted turning over the country's Jewish citizens to the Nazi death
machinery. In 1944, the Nazis took over their erstwhile ally to prevent
the Hungarians from making a separate peace with the Allies, and began
deporting Hungary's Jews  many of them refugees from other countries
 to Auschwitz.

In general, conditions
were most appalling in Eastern Europe, where two-thirds of European Jews
lived. Mass killings, such as the murder of the Jewish citizens of Lenin,
began in Eastern Europe in June, 1941. Six special killing centers or
"extermination camps" were constructed from late 1941 to mid-1942, the
largest and deadliest being Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Beginning in 1942,
Jews from all corners of Europe were deported, country by country, to
these death camps.

Of the nine million
Jews living in Nazi-controlled territories, more than six million were
killed by the end of the war, among them most of Barbara's, Faye's and
Shula's immediate families. In a very real sense, Barbara's, Faye's and
Shula's survival itself represents an act of resistance: By living on
to tell their stories and to establish their own families after the war,
they defied the Nazis plans to eradicate Jewish life.